Mitchell Report.. F.P. Santangelo ??

[John Galt]

I think he's coming clean as far as he thinks he can without giving up names, etc. .... Maybe he's telling the truth, as much as he is willing to share at this point.

I don't.

I don't find his story credible at all. He is casting as much doubt as he can on the report, and he is denying everything except what can be pinned to him with hard evidence (scanned copy of his check). But he is calling Adam Piatt a liar, and he is casting aspersions at MLB and the commissioners office. He is singing his own praises for "being the only guy taking calls this morning about it", and bristling at anyone who was calling him on this BS. He was his usual "snide and smarmy" self as one caller so aptly put it.

He has not admitted anything that he has not been caught RED HANDED at, and he has denied everything that he has not been caught AS red handed at (Piatt's statement).

I don't think there is any basis whatsoever to believe anything FP has to say. It is a total leap of faith to assume he is in any slightest way shape or form "coming clean" now.

I listened this morning from 7-9. All I heard was spin, excuses, and most probably...more lies.

Now I want to ask you this... over the past two years or so, at any time could not FP have said "it is not as simple an issue as it seems. some guys are using it just theraputically to try to recover from injuries, not to enhance performance. In fact I used it to recover from an injury.. for four weeks out of my career. And I regret it very much."

If THAT was the truth and the whole truth, he could have said it long ago without fear of legal repercussions or employment repercussions and you and I know it. It totally belies common sense that this "truth" had to be kept under wraps at all costs.

He is still lying, he is participating in a big leaguers' code of silence, and his hypocracy is disgusting imho.

 

[Gary]

Thanks Warhawk fo the blow by blow.

I have to agree with Francisco on this one though. Personally I feel he is leaving a lot out of it. I think he's only admitting to what he has ben caught with. I have a feeling he is not telling us everything that happened.

One thing I guess that will come out of it is that he has lost a lot of what he is about "telling it like it is" on the Rise Guys show. He has lost ton of credibility.. I think he is a liar, and I still think he is lying.

 

[Warhawk]

Thanks Warhawk fo the blow by blow.

I have to agree with Francisco on this one though. Personally I feel he is leaving a lot out of it. I think he's only admitting to what he has ben caught with. I have a feeling he is not telling us everything that happened.

One thing I guess that will come out of it is that he has lost a lot of what he is about "telling it like it is" on the Rise Guys show. He has lost ton of credibility.. I think he is a liar, and I still think he is lying.

I agree with you both to a certain extent, but it's hard to know anything for sure. In the long run doesn't really matter what I think anyways.

I am not a baseball "fan" and really don't follow it at all. I think the only thing keeping me interested here is the local angle and the "car crash" effect - you can't help but look as you drive by.

 

[Glenn]

Thanks, but I just want to have him/her document that specific list in the post. Throwing out a list without a reference to where it came from does nobody any good. Hard to know whether it is correct or not if that isn't provided, and it is "lazy" posting.

I understand totally.

 

[Glenn]

Baseball is a game of stats. There are statistics on everything and some will claim that "the most important stat in sports" is the number of home runs in a season or the total number of home runs in a career. In all sports!!!

This has been rendered meaningless and to me, it is a major crime on the sport of baseball.

Now to FP and players like him: he did it to extend his career. What right does he have to extend his career if in doing so he is preeventing a more worthy person from having a career?

And to the attitude that it is the fault of MLB for not policing the rules, BS. We must police ourselves. We are civilized human beings. Unfortunately, sometimes the stakes are so high that even the best of people is tempted to break the rules. It is still their fault.

The only sport I have played well and continued as an umpire is baseball. I used to love baseball. Now it is a sham! Drugs are in and people look the other way. Like any rule that is not enforced, people soon think it is OK to break. Kinda like the speed limit.

Now I know I have said two different things. One was that the player is ultimately responsible for his own behavior and the other laying the blame on Bud Selig. I hope that I am not criticized for that seeming inconsistency but I hate the excuse that players did it because they could get away with it. They are still slime.

 

[kennadog]

I was thinking this morning about this. If I were a baseball player in the late 1980s - early 2000's, I would have been taking steroids. No doubt about it. MLB wasn't testing until 2004(?). They still don't test for HGH, because there's no reliable way to test for it that the Player's Association will approve. The only way you would have gotten in trouble would have been if you were caught red-handed.

I can't really blame the players who did this, because baseball let them do it. They had to know what was going on, and did nothing to try to prevent it.

I disagree. It doesn't matter if MLB had testing. Buying these various drugs without a medical prescription was/is illegal under the law. They chose to break the law. That is a personal choice and it doesn't matter if they intended to enhance performance or recover from injury.

By the way, if it really does help with injury healing, then people should be able to get a prescription, no problem. I have to wonder about that claim, though, because it seems like drug companies would've jumped all over that market a long time ago, if they could prove it to the FDA.

Personally, I have always felt that using perfomance-enhancing drugs is cheating. It's certainly unfair to people who had the same dreams as these players, but wanted to maintain their integrity and do it clean.

Could the league have done more? Sure. They looked the other way, while making lots of money. To me, that is absolutely no excuse for personal choices players made or are making (in lots of sports). Nobody forced them into those decisions. They had free will to choose right or wrong.

I understand bad choices and mistakes well. I'm human and so are these guys. These players compounded error by lying about it. I can move past this whole era without excuses or explanations. I'd rather not hear them, even.

I don't actually think this report does much good. I's like a surprise party for someone (the public)who already pretty much knows about the party. A better choice, to me, would've been to just say it appears/appeared to be rampant, MLB should've done something more about it and they intend to going forward. End of story.

 

[uolj]

I can't believe that a few players did not show up on the Mitchell report. Especially a few guys such as: Brady Anderson, Ron Gant, and Luis Gonzalez. Gonzalez seems to fly under the radar. Look ar Gonzalez's stats in the late 90's and early 2000's.

The report is not in any way a comprehensive list. The only people named are people who were linked to the performance enhancing drugs by a small handful of sources.

 

[Superman]

I disagree. It doesn't matter if MLB had testing. Buying these various drugs without a medical prescription was/is illegal under the law. They chose to break the law. That is a personal choice and it doesn't matter if they intended to enhance performance or recover from injury.

By the way, if it really does help with injury healing, then people should be able to get a prescription, no problem. I have to wonder about that claim, though, because it seems like drug companies would've jumped all over that market a long time ago, if they could prove it to the FDA.

Personally, I have always felt that using perfomance-enhancing drugs is cheating. It's certainly unfair to people who had the same dreams as these players, but wanted to maintain their integrity and do it clean.

Could the league have done more? Sure. They looked the other way, while making lots of money. To me, that is absolutely no excuse for personal choices players made or are making (in lots of sports). Nobody forced them into those decisions. They had free will to choose right or wrong.

I understand bad choices and mistakes well. I'm human and so are these guys. These players compounded error by lying about it. I can move past this whole era without excuses or explanations. I'd rather not hear them, even.

I don't actually think this report does much good. I's like a surprise party for someone (the public)who already pretty much knows about the party. A better choice, to me, would've been to just say it appears/appeared to be rampant, MLB should've done something more about it and they intend to going forward. End of story.

I agree with you. I'm not trying to excuse the players for what they did, because they did it of their own accord and were wrong for it. On top of that, as you said, they lied about it and made it even worse.

All I'm saying is that, if I were a professional baseball player and I was presented with the opportunity to used illegal PEDs without repercussion, I would probably have been right there doing them. I would have been wrong and immoral, but I would have been doing it. There was no penalty. Do you think guys like David Justice, who have been out of baseball for a while now but have been tied to steroid use later, are going to get penalized for what they did? I don't.

And, so, my point is that MLB has to bear the burden for this. It started with the players, but once MLB got a sniff of players using illegal PEDs, they should have cracked down on it. They turned their heads the other way. Begrudgingly, they finally instituted a 10 game suspension (maybe 5 to begin, not sure), as a penalty for a first offense, which is laughable, as it's only like 5% of their season; the NFL takes 25% of your season for a first offense. But they didn't start testing until a decade after steroids became a problem. There's no plausible deniability for Baseball. It's the League's job to know what's going on, especially if it's criminal, and do what they can to put a stop to it. They didn't. They turned their heads because the record-breaking numbers were good for the sport. I sat there and watched Mark McGwire break Roger Maris' home run record, and I wasn't even a baseball fan at the time. That's what Baseball wanted.

Now, they have a mess on their hands that the NFL will never have, because the NFL was proactive and tried to establish policies to keep illegal PEDs out of the League. A player taking steroids in the NFL had to sneak to do it. These baseball players were apparently sharing needles in the circle like Ashton Kutcher and Topher Grace!

All I'm saying is that, while the blame starts and ends with the players, this problem wouldn't have been as big of an issue if Baseball had taken steps to keep steroids and other illegal PEDs out of the sport.

 

[LPKingsFan]

I was thinking this morning about this. If I were a baseball player in the late 1980s - early 2000's, I would have been taking steroids. No doubt about it. MLB wasn't testing until 2004(?). They still don't test for HGH, because there's no reliable way to test for it that the Player's Association will approve. The only way you would have gotten in trouble would have been if you were caught red-handed.

I can't really blame the players who did this, because baseball let them do it. They had to know what was going on, and did nothing to try to prevent it.

That's the distinction I make between MLB and the NFL. The NFL has been very proactive about trying to keep illegal performance enhancing drugs out of its league. Not to say that no one is taking them; we have seen that that's not the case. But the NFL will be able to say that they didn't just turn their heads and allow this to overtake their sport. MLB will not have that benefit.

I agree with you. I think you're getting to something easily overlooked here, and that's how pervasive the drug culture was. It's easy to sit and type that "oh, no, I would never do that" but when you've devoted your life to a sport and you find yourself in a situation like that trying to stay competitive, lines start blurring and decisions like that get made. I don't know what I would do, but I can't sit here and pretend I would just take the high road.

All I can say is I am sooo glad my favorite player is not on the list.

That list is far from the final say.